SALON

Monday, Dec 17, 2012 4:04 PM UTC

Gun owners can’t hurt Democrats

President Obama needs to follow through on his promise from last night's speech and stop kowtowing to extremists

By , The American Prospect

Topics: The American Prospect, Guns, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Tuscon, Aurora,

Gun owners can't hurt Democrats (Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak)
This article originally appeared on The American Prospect.

The American Prospect The most notable thing to come out of President Obama’s speech last night—eulogizing the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut—was his unambiguous commitment to pursuing new gun regulations in the coming weeks. Granted, he didn’t use the word “gun,” but the implications were clear:

If there’s even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town from the grief that’s visited Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, then surely we have an obligation to try.

In the coming weeks, I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this, because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine.

Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?

Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?

It’s hard to know what, exactly, the federal government can do to reduce the incidence of mass shootings. To a large degree, each shooting is sui generis—some shooters have been mentally ill, others haven’t. Some shooters have had concrete motivations, others, none at all. And while some shooters might have been stopped by tighter restrictions on guns and ammunition, others—like the shooter in Newtown—were able to rely on an existing and easy-to-access stockpile of weapons (in this case, his mother’s arsenal).

With all of that said, Democrats shouldn’t be afraid of running with this issue. The common wisdom in the Democratic Party is that gun regulations—whether focused around control or safety—are an electoral loser; that they alienate the middle and working-class white men who are critical in Rust Belt and Midwestern states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin.

And while there isn’t much evidence to prove that gun control cost Al Gore the 2000 presidential election—states like Kentucky and Tennessee, which Clinton-Gore won, had become more Republican across the board—many Democrats associate gun control with electoral disaster. So much so that, in recent years, it’s become common for Democrats in more rural states to tout their gun-owning bona fides—during the 2004 Democratic primary, Howard Deantouted his NRA endorsement as evidence of bipartisan appeal.

But, as Nate Cohn pointed out for The New Republic over the weekend, it’s not clear that Democrats have any votes to lose by endorsing new gun regulations. The votes who might be alienated by a renewed emphasis on gun control—rural and exurban men—have been lost to Democrats for nearly a decade, despite their utter silence on the issue. “Obama and Kerry both performed worse than Gore among conservative rural voters,” writes Cohn, “The fact is that these pro-gun voters are lost to Republicans, and probably for good.”

Indeed, the last two elections have shown decisively that Democrats can win large national victories without meaningful support from white men, and gun-owning white men in particular. The Democratic Party’s support is based in dense suburbs and urban areas, which are also the areas where gun control is most salient. Voters in Columbus, Ohio for example, almost certainly wantfewer guns, not more.

There is a chance that this could jeopardize Democratic gains in states like Virginia and North Carolina, but even there, the same dynamic is at play. In both states, Democrats draw the large majority of their support from cities and suburbs, dominated by women, young people, and minorities. And in general, these aren’t groups with a strong stake in gun ownership. On the presidential level, at least, Democrats don’t need to worry about alienating their coalition.

With all of that said, the calculus is different for congressional and state-level Democrats, some of whom can’t afford to alienate traditionally gun-owning groups. But in those cases, of course, the Democratic Party’s flexibility is a big asset.

Continue Reading Close
Read more of The American Prospect at http://www.prospect.org.

More Jamelle Bouie.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 3 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

Salon is proud to feature content from The American Prospect, a Washington, D.C.-based political magazine that focuses on longform journalism and smart analysis. Check out more Prospect writers by clicking here.

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations